In “Almost Famous,” Philip Seymour Hoffman, portraying the rock critic Lester Bangs, proclaims: “True music, not just rock ’n’ roll, it chooses you. It lives in your car, or alone, listening to your headphones, with the vast, scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America.”

He has a point. Like no other art form, music muscles a path toward you and gets under the skin. Music can be a refuge and a secret, the old childhood friend who never fails to take your phone call. It can also be a symbol of everything that has gone amok in our lives and our culture.

The relationship between performer and spectator is equally mysterious and intense. The way David Gilmour, in that second “Comfortably Numb” solo, never fails to give life to the notes that are forever in your heart, so too can the sweet-faced pop star affect you — she of the ear worm song playing in all the Nike commercials, the one Forbes just listed as the highest paid entertainer of the year. She can make you feel like the last sane man in a madhouse.

It is this strange and shifting divide between music and listener — rock gods drenched in all that gold light onstage, their faceless fans packed into the darkness, watching them — that Jeff Jackson explores to shattering effect in his wild roar of a novel “Destroy All Monsters.” By the end, you feel you’ve emerged from an invitation-only Doors concert, one that starts out with a relatively benign “Love Me Two Times” and ends hours later with Jim Morrison passed out somewhere behind an amp, the band playing a screeching Skrillex remix of “The End” as the audience storms the stage.

The novel’s premise is simple: All across the United States, bands are being gunned down during live concerts.

“The garage rockers at the tavern in the New England suburbs. … The bluegrass revivalists at the coffeehouse in the Deep South. There was never any fanfare. The killers simply walked into the clubs, took out their weapons and started firing.”

The motive for the attacks is unclear, the connection among killers unknown. Yet Jackson quickly moves beyond the obvious provocation of this ripped-from-the-headlines setup. He is more concerned with the feedback loops and endless reverb of violence, investigating those who have the determination to stand up and play, demanding consideration, and with what happens when the act turns lethal.

We follow Xenie, Shaun, Eddie and Florian — a combination of young local musicians and die-hard music fans — as they drift through Arcadia, a small, “conservative industrial city” in an unnamed state. When a massacre takes one of their own as a victim, they are catapulted into a mosh pit of paranoia, obsession, guilt and a quest to find meaning.

“As I stood alone in my bedroom,” Xenie notes, “my headphones boring into my temples, there was a feeling of something rotting in my chest. Maybe whatever infected the killers had also infected me.”

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Writing about music is tricky. Ninety-nine percent of the time hearing the actual song or going to the actual concert is far more revealing than any paragraph describing it. But Jackson pulls off this near-impossible feat, pulling the reader past the velvet ropes into the black-box theaters and sweaty, sticky-floored stadiums.

The book opens with a prelude, the narrator setting the stage, so to speak, for what’s to come. “The strip-mall goths, the mod metalheads, the blue-collar ravers … the jaded aesthetes who consider themselves beyond category. Everyone in line has imagined a night that could crack open and transform their dreary realities. This is it.”

The prose can feel as cool as Rat Pack-era Sinatra and as sad as Lou Reed singing about a perfect day: “I was terrified that I might lose him, the one person I loved, my deepest connection to this rotten planet.” For all his insider knowledge and passion for music, Jackson is also at ease writing about the odd details of the everyday. There are confused kids and silent strangers in restaurants, funerals and forests. As Eddie and Xenie try to connect during a walk at nightfall, “the evening keeps losing texture. … She finds she’s enlivened by the darkness that erases their expressions and absorbs their gestures. There’s only the tenor of their voices to navigate, and this makes it easier to talk.”

Why the violence keeps happening is the mystery burning beneath the novel, predatory and seductive as a Kendrick Lamar bass line. Jackson presents the novel like a vinyl record, with an A-side and a B-side. Shaun gives us the keys to this setup by confessing: “I prefer the B-sides. They’re the tunes where the bands bury their secrets.”

So too with Jackson’s own B-side, which contains revelations previously hidden on the reverse side of the narrative. Minor themes are repeated, magnified, rephrased. Do the killers act as a means of control, to intertwine their lives with the band’s, as Chapman did with Lennon? Do they see themselves as the singer onstage, the act of murder a desire to silence themselves?

Or are these strikes the result of our everyone-is-a-star culture, in which these characters’ world is so saturated with bands and lyrics and melodies that, Xenie reflects, “the music didn’t sound like anything” any longer? Has music making become so widespread that it’s been diluted of its power to transcend? What happens when music is no longer a “place apart,” as Lester Bangs imagined, but inextricable from that “benign lap of America” from which we could once escape?

An answer may be found at “Springsteen on Broadway,” when the Boss stands before the audience and quietly explains why he is up on that stage and we aren’t.

“DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for … fame? … love? … admiration? … attention? … women? … sex? … and oh, yeah … a buck. Then … if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just … don’t … quit … burning.”

What he’s describing is a perfect storm. But not everyone can be a Springsteen, an unknown kid who steps out of the blue with immense drive, pain and an ineffable magic that defies logic, and gives us a voice, again and again.

The best art is a miracle, and there can be only a handful of miracles; the rest of us will just have to be happy with our fates and keep on dancing in the dark. Of course, in America, as Jackson horrifyingly points out, if this divide is just too unfair to withstand, we have a second option available: picking up a gun. Like a lead singer’s microphone, a gun in hand means people will listen to you and only you. And as he points out in his final line, sometimes violence “sounds like applause,” after all.